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Sales and Marketing — Same Team, Different Jerseys?

Even though sales and marketing should be best friends, more often than not, they’re fighting like siblings over who gets to sit in the front seat of the car.

Sales says, “We need better leads!”

Marketing says, “We need better closers!”

While all of this is going on, the prospective customer gets caught in the middle.

What if we stopped seeing sales and marketing as separate teams and, instead, saw them as two sides of the same coin? Because really, they are. Or they certainly should be.

Marketing creates the promise, and sales delivers on that promise. But when they don’t speak the same language, the customer experience is broken. That sparkling marketing campaign says one thing, and the sales conversation says something completely different. Who feels it? The prospective customer.

If you’re with me so far, the question you should be asking is this: how do we fix it? How do we get sales and marketing not just aligned, but synchronized? My answer? One word — understanding.

Marketing needs to understand the battlefield that the sales team walks into every day. Not in theory, but in reality. What are the objections that sales professionals encounter? What makes prospects want to ‘think about it?’ This information is gold for marketers. It helps them craft messaging that resonates.

And sales? They need to understand that marketing isn’t making it up as they go along. There’s strategy and intent. And it takes time for that top-of-funnel awareness to develop into a conversation. Sales can’t expect ready-made leads to pour out of a magic marketing faucet.

Where does all this understanding lead? It opens the door to alignment. But alignment isn’t about more meetings and more talking. It’s about shared ownership. When sales wins, marketing wins. When marketing hits it over the fence, sales experiences it in their pipeline.

So maybe the real question is not “How do we align sales and marketing?” but “How do we get everyone to align with the wants and needs of the customer?”

So I’ll leave you with this challenge: stop treating sales and marketing as two unique departments. Treat them as one unit.

One conversation.

One voice.

One mission.

Then, watch how fast everything changes for the better. For the customer. For the organization. For the market. For the world.

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